- characteristics
- Examples
- Death
- Hypocrisy
- The game of life
- Differences between lyrical motif and temperament
- References
The lyrical motif includes the situations, ideas or emotions that arouse the poet's sensitivity, and around which the poem is built. They are the significant human experiences expressed in the poem. These meaningful experiences, which can become a lyrical motif, are of an extremely varied and extensive nature.
For example, they can be the love of a mother for her children, the feeling of loneliness, the remembrance of the years of youth, the anguish of being away from home, the pain due to the absence of a loved one, among others. In general, the lyrical motif is one of the aspects on which the lyrical genre is based.
The latter has as its main purpose to convey the feelings or sensations of an author regarding a person or object. Usually, the expression lyrical genre is the poem. In turn, this is usually expressed in verse, although there are also poems in prose (lyrical prose). In both cases a lyrical motif is always present.
characteristics
The lyrical motif is an idea, situation or a feeling that inspires the poem and that is reflected in it. For the lyrical speaker, this object (or subject or event) is loaded with personal meanings.
Through this -as is characteristic of the genre- the poet's subjectivity is expressed. To describe it, abstract nouns are usually used such as sadness, longing, enjoyment, happiness, among others.
On the other hand, a lyrical motif differs from a narrative motif. In the narrative, a certain situation (or motive) precipitates events. For its part, in poetry it is an inner impulse that triggers the work.
Thus, a lyrical motif is understood as meaningful situations that are not necessarily centered on the development of an action, but are transformed into experiences for the soul.
Examples
Death
In the following poem by Miguel Hernández, entitled "A knife carnivore," it can be seen that the lyrical motif is death.
Through the use of metaphors (including the one that compares death with a knife "with a sweet and homicidal wing"), the author alludes to the ever-present threat of the end of life.
“A carnivorous knife
with a sweet and murderous wing
sustains a flight and a glow
around my life.
A lightning
bolt of crisp metal, falling brilliantly,
pecks at my side
and makes a sad nest in it.
My temple, the flowery balcony
of my early ages,
is black, and my heart,
and my heart with gray hair.
Such is the evil virtue
of the lightning that surrounds me,
that I go to my youth
like the moon to my village.
I collect with my eyelashes
salt of the soul and salt of the eye
and flowers of cobwebs
of my sadness I collect.
Where can I go that
my doom will not seek?
Your destination is the beach
and my vocation of the sea.
Resting from this work
of hurricane, love or hell
is not possible, and the pain
will do me eternal regret.
But at last I will be able to defeat you,
bird and secular ray,
heart, that of death
no one has to make me doubt.
So keep going, knife,
flying, wounding. Someday
the weather will turn yellow
on my photograph ”.
Hypocrisy
Next, the poem by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz has as its lyrical motive the hypocrisy of men with respect to the behavior of women.
"Foolish men who accuse
women without reason,
without seeing that you are the occasion
of the same thing that you blame:
if with unequaled eagerness you
request their disdain,
why do you want them to do good
if you incite them to evil?
You fight their resistance,
and then gravely
say that it was lightness
that the diligence did.
You want with foolish presumption to
find the one you are looking
for, for the pretended, Tais,
and in the possession, Lucrecia.
What humor can be weirder
than one that lacks advice,
blurs the mirror himself,
and feels that it is unclear?
With favor and disdain
you have equal status, complaining, if they treat you badly,
mocking, if they love you well.
Opinion does not win,
because the one that is most modest,
if it does not admit you, it is ungrateful
and if it admits you, it is light.
You are always so foolish
that with unequal level
you blame one for cruel
and another for easy blame.
Well, how should
the one your love wants be tempered,
if the one that is ungrateful offends
and the one that is easy angers?… "
The game of life
The poem «Ajedrez» by Jorge Luis Borges seems to have as a lyrical motif the constant struggles that must be faced throughout life. In addition, it refers to the hand of a player (God) who "governs his destiny."
“In his grave corner, the players
rule the slow pieces. The board
delays them until dawn in its severe
realm where two colors hate each other.
Within
the forms radiate magical rigors: Homeric rook, light
knight, queen army, last king,
oblique bishop and aggressor pawns.
When the players are gone,
when time has consumed them,
the rite will certainly not have ceased.
In the East this war was ignited
whose amphitheater is today the whole Earth.
Like the other, this game is infinite.
Tenuous king, bishop bias, fierce
queen, direct rook and sly pawn
on the black and white of the road
they seek and wage their armed battle.
They do not know that the
player's appointed hand governs their destiny,
they do not know that an adamantine rigor
holds their agency and their journey.
The player is also a prisoner
(the sentence belongs to Omar) on another board
of black nights and white days.
God moves the player, and the player the piece.
What God behind God does the plot begin
from dust and time and dream and agony? "
Differences between lyrical motif and temperament
Both, temper of mind and lyrical motif, are part of the structure of the lyrical genre. The first is the mood of the lyrical speaker, while the second is what generates that state of mind.
Also, another important difference between these two terms is that a mood can change throughout a poem. Instead, the lyrical motif is usually the same throughout the work.
References
- Domínguez Hidalgo, A. (2004). New initiation to literary structures and their textual appreciation. Mexico DF: Editorial Progreso.
- Miralles Nuñez, MT et al. (2000). Language and communication. Santiago: Editions Universidad Católica de Chile.
- Ariel Clarenc, C. (2011). Notions of Cyberculture and Literature. Hillsborough: Lulu.com.
- Santini, A. (2000). The migration of the symbol: the function of myth in seven Hispanic texts. Santiago: RIL Editores.
- Villa Hernández, J. (2007). Constructivist literature. Mexico DF: Ediciones Umbral.